Company

Freedom Photonics is an employee-owned limited-liability company, based in Santa Barbara, California. The company was founded in 2005, with a vision to commercialize photonic integrated circuit technology and has experienced continuous growth since. We specialize in photonic components, modules and subsystems for a variety of applications spanning fiber-optic and free-space optical (analog and digital) communications and sensing. Our world-class technical team has a wealth of experience in successful design, development and volume manufacturing of semiconductor lasers, photodetectors and high-functionality, high performance photonic IC based products.

Dr. Leif A. Johansson

Chief Technology Officer

Dr. Johansson is a co-founder and the Chief Technical Officer of Freedom Photonics.

Dr. Johansson has 20 years of experience related photonic integrated circuits, widely tunable lasers, radio-frequency photonics, analog optical communications, radio over fiber systems and coherent optical communications. This work has resulted in a number of novel concepts and record results in the area of RF and coherent photonic ICs.Before Freedom Photonics, Dr. Johansson has been involved in the development of RF photonic devices and subsystems at University of California, Santa Barbara and at Agility Communications (now Lumentum).

Dr. Johansson obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University College London, UK. He has authored or co-authored over 220 publications in the areas of RF photonics and photonic integrated circuits, and has given numerous invited and contributed talks at various international conferences. He has chaired, serves or has served on technical committees for IEEE Microwave Photonics Conference, Optical Fiber Communications Conference, IEEE Photonics Conference.

Dr. Milan L. Mashanovitch

Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Mashanovitch is a Co-Founder and the Chief Executive Officer of Freedom Photonics.

Dr. Mashanovitch brings to the team a diverse engineering background, including 20 years of experience in working with photonics, spanning over modeling, design, fabrication, testing and packaging of photonic integrated circuits, combined with 10 years of management experience.

In addition to Freedom Photonics, Dr. Mashanovitch has worked for the University of California Santa Barbara on photonic integrated circuits for packet switching, as an Adjunct Professor teaching graduate level classes on semiconductor lasers and photonic ICs, and as an engineer at the Lucent Technologies Netherlands in the wireless IP hardware networking group.

Dr. Mashanovitch has co-authored ~ 130 papers, many invited, on photonic integrated circuits and various photonic devices. He is one of the authors of the second edition of the “Diode Lasers and Photonic Integrated Circuits” textbook, published by John Wiley and Sons in 2012. He has chaired, serves or has served on technical committees for IEEE Avionics, Fiber Optics and Photonics Conference, IEEE Microwave Photonics Conference, OSA’s Integrated Photonics Research Conference, International Semiconductor Laser Conference, Indium Phosphide and Related Materials Conference and IEEE Photonics Conference.

Dr. Gordon B. Morrison

Director of Engineering

Dr. Morrison is the Director of Engineering at Freedom Photonics.

Dr. Morrison has ~ 20 years of experience in the design and engineering of various photonic devices, including DFB lasers, tunable lasers and externally modulated DFB lasers. In addition, he has been responsible for production, testing and qualification of semiconductor laser products according to Telcordia Standards (GR 468, 63). Dr. Morrison has received his Ph.D. from McMaster University in Canada. Before joining Freedom Photonics, he spent a number of years in various senior engineering and manufacturing roles at Avago Technologies and Cyoptics where he was responsible for improvements to the design, reliability, and manufacturability of DFB lasers and external cavity tunable lasers. Prior to that, he has worked at Apogee Photonics, where he worked on the externally modulated laser product, and contributed to wafer level process development and life-time aging analysis and qualification of semiconductor optical components.

Dr. Daniel Renner

V.P. Business Development

Dr. Renner is Vice-President for Business Development at Freedom Photonics, responsible for the identification of new business areas, definition of new products and programs and the successful introduction of these products into the market. Freedom Photonics has developed innovative photonic technologies leading to products in the Telecommunications, Satcom, Avionics and Medical markets.

Dr. Renner has over 25 years of experience in the development, manufacturing and commercialization of complex photonic devices and systems. His experience spans both the technical and the commercial aspects of photonic products, having led activities in many areas, including technology and product development, identification of new business areas, introduction of new products, marketing and sales. These activities have contributed to many successful businesses. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge where he worked on the design and characterization of semiconductor lasers, including mode and spectral control of these devices. Prior to joining Freedom Photonics, Dr. Renner held positions of increasing technical and business responsibility at Standard Telecommunication Labs., Rockwell International, Ortel Corporation, Agility Communications and Aerius Photonics/FLIR EOC. At these companies, Dr. Renner was responsible for a wide range of commercially successful photonic products such as highly reliable semiconductor lasers for high speed transmission, CATV fiber-optic transmitters and receivers, analog fiber-optic links for antenna remoting, 1550 nm widely-tunable semiconductor laser transmitters and large high power 2-D VCSEL arrays.